"... The Sacramento Bee Sunday features section was only 20 pages last week and with absolutely nothing worth reading. Two weeks ago, they took two full Sunday sections and made one lousy one. A total failure. The features editor will probably get a bonus. They are major league out of touch with readership."
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6 comments:
Advertising drives the page count, and in turn the news hole.
Fewer ads -- lower the page count for the book.
Newspaper 101
I saw advertising but most of it was the same ads they had in the now-defunct Sunday features tabloid. From a total of the equivalent of 30-plus pages on Sunday, they've boiled it down to 20 pages. Yet they're saying you get so much more!
Overheard: If you want to contact the Bee, open a manhole cover and shout!
The editor (Sills) announced this merger of sections prior to launch. She hates features and the feeling is mutual among the staffers. It's a festering situation and has been handled very poorly by management.
Anon 1:42 is right on. She's been slicing and dicing features since day one. What's left isn't worth reading, which was probably the plan all along.
Online is the only good product in Sac and that's run by a designated managing editor (Negrete). It's a sorry state of affairs at the mother ship.
There are fewer ads because McClatchy priced itself right out of the market - at least at the N&O. Every year, 10-12% increases. No increase in circulation; no inflation. Add-ons that were bread & butter, easy sells, became chunks of money. Advertisers balked. No one could show me a point of diminishing returns. In the end, we just pushed our advertisers to the internet because we priced so many out of the market (at the time there was nearly free alternatives - very bad move), and pissed off the rest - who, by the way, were also people who support the community and had read the paper 'forever.'
Not to mention the N&O/McClatchy disbanding nando.com - at the time Craigslist was just beginning to expand. And buying Careerbuilder so that the newspaper sales forces were now competing against CB sales forces for the online sales. Talk about sleeping with the enemy. But hey, all money lands in Sacramento, right?
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